What kind of a year is this for service-oriented architecture (SOA)? With 2007 half over, we asked SOA trend watchers what they are seeing that is encouraging and/or discouraging. Here is how they see the state of SOA.

Some good questions and bad solutions
Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC

Encouraging: Enterprises are asking the right questions -- questions about governance, loose coupling and agility.

Discouraging: Some vendors are still pushing integration software as the key to SOA, when in fact, more integration software is often the last thing enterprises need to be successful with SOA.